These scare threads are stupid. "HURR DURR POOL HAS 51% OF MINING POWR" What are they going to do? It's not like miners will continue to support that 51% after an attack. The pool would be finished. There is no incentive whatsoever for a pool such as GHash.io to attack the Bitcoin network.

Dude, do you know who runs ghash.io and who owns it?Check that out and come back later.

You mean cex.io? Yes, I happen to have an account there. There is STILL no incentive for Ghash to attack the Bitcoin network because it would mean a serious loss of customers for CEX.

Does anyone KNOW what actual % Ghash owns? Anyone with half a brain knows that if miners see to much % at Ghash, they just point their miners at another pool. I just wish more miners would realize that bigger pools don't mean bigger payouts. MAYBE if you pool hop just right, but in the long run it all averages out.

Someone else like Cloudhashing or another large-scale hosted setup would start getting close enough to ensure that 51% becomes impossible for GHash.io to pull off, in conjunction with, say, some of the smaller mining pools merging to better increase the chances of them getting shares. Things will gradually move towards share or contract-style setups due to economies of scale. A third or fourth pool of a similar size to both would in effect be increased insurance of the chance of 51% ever occurring.

TL;DR, the odds will shrink in the future of a 51% attack occurring through consolidation and competing services.

Even if gigahash was at 75% it doesn't mean Bitcoin has been forked or 51%ed. It just means that they would have that option. I'm certainly not saying this is ideal or good and I personally believe in p2p pools, but there would be no legitimate reason for any pool to 51% Bitcoin unless their goal from day 1 was nefarious.

All that being said, there are some other really nice pools (slush being my recommendation) out there besides gigahash.io, that might be worth a try for some of you to help even things out a bit

It'll be interesting to watch the price of bitcoins if Gigahash goes over 51%. My guess: it won't change much. I suspect that the typical bitcoin user doesn't worry about a 51% attack all that much. In any case, even if Gigahash gets 51%, unless they aren't legitimate miners and are someone with a vested interest in taking down Bitcoin, which I suspect isn't the case, it's in their own interest to not execute a double spend attack. They have the most mining power and the coins that they're generating will be devalued if they do, because them hitting 51% might not affect the price of bitcoins much. But you can bet them executing a 51% attack would definitely negatively impact the price of bitcoins.

Ultimately, I do agree with others who say that miners in Gigahash would be wise to switch to another pool until they get down to the 30% range. Even if they have no intentions to do a double spend attack on the network, the mere possibility of them doing so might cause a bit of a panic if I'm mistaken and this is something that typical bitcoin users worry about.

I suspect that the typical bitcoin user doesn't worry about a 51% attack all that much. In any case, even if Gigahash gets 51%, unless they aren't legitimate miners and are someone with a vested interest in taking down Bitcoin, which I suspect isn't the case, it's in their own interest to not execute a double spend attack.

It is not a good idea to let them have 51%. They could decide at any time to engage in selfish mining and institute a monopoly.51% power means they could solve 100% of the blocks by producing the longest chains and shut everyone else out...IF they chose to do that.

1) 51% by itself is not a problem. It becomes problem if person who is in control of those 51% does something silly which is highly not in their intrest

2) Fear of 51% attach should not be in "someone massing large amounts of ASIC hardware" or "someone attracting more than 51% of mining power". It's much easier to destroy bitcoin network. All NSA (for example) needs to do is to get to leaders of top 3-4 mining pools (somehow...some dark secrets etc.), and it's game over. As users switch from largest one to smaller pool, nothing change. They are still getting into controlled one. Person / system who would control those 3-4 people (and we all agree it's not hard to control 3-4 individuals) would be running bitcoin network as he wants and would have ability to undermine it so hard that it wouldnt come back up

3) Hardware is not protection of the network. Bitcoin is not strong because of ASIC's, it's strong because of it's protocol. So, if you need to protect software, you dont protect it with hardware, you protect it on software side. Soltions to "pool mining", "51% attack" etc. are out there. Devs just need to implement them inside code.

51% is totally a problem.if someone has 51% of hashing power then we have to trust they aren't going to shut bitcoin down one day.if you want a system where you need to trust someone then it already exists, its called a bank.